Performance Management – it’s not just about the reviews

It’s the time of year when many customers have just completed their performance reviews and are in the process of starting a new cycle. It’s also a time of year when we see a large rise in our support desk tickets at the Cognology House of Fun office. Looking at the support tickets alongside an analysis of how clients are using the system tells us that there is an opportunity for our customers to utilise more of our platform within their performance management process and as a result gain more value from it. Many can also take advantage of process improvements.

A better performance management process?

Now we’ve talked a lot about moving toward the new world of work, a world where Agile performance is king and employees are regularly updating goals, and getting feedback in real-time. As much as we see a lot of the big corporate players moving toward this approach (think companies such as Google, Deloitte, and Adobe), we’re also seeing a lot of customers shy away from this, because they feel that their organisation may not be like Google or perhaps they may feel, the organisational culture of the company wouldn’t support it. Really, the truth of it is most organisations either don’t know how to move to a better performance management process, or are just plain scared of implementing one. As a Human Resources consultant, the thing that scares me the most about this are the mind blowing stats that paint a very different picture. According to a recent study by Deloitte 58%¹ of employees say that their performance management process is not an effective use of time and even more scarily only 8% of organisations say that their performance management process is highly effective. These are the sort of statistics that would make any organisation want to move away from their current outdated approaches.

Respond to changes

A 2015, Gallup survey² made headlines when it suggested that Human Resources isn’t meeting global business demands. Instead of being agile and moving with the times (unlike our friends in the marketing or sales teams), as HR professionals we seem to be either slow at implementing changes or putting in place systems that are so complex, convoluted, and wrapped up in some good old fashioned administrative red tape (because we still feel a need to pay homage to our personnel roots). Human Resources needs to respond to changes in Performance Management processes, by looking at it from an Employee or Manager’s perspective. They need to ensure that a vast range of Employees and Managers are involved in the process to gain the fundamental buy-in they need across the organisation. Without this it doesn’t matter what software or paper based system is used, no one will be engaged in the process.

Software based systems shine

Once Employees and Managers are engaged in the performance management process, Human Resources teams, must be trained on how to analyse the data from reports and use it to their advantage. According to recent data from Bensin by Deloitte³, Human Resources teams are not skilled enough to run software reports or analyse the data that comes out of them. Without data the Performance Management process really becomes null and void. This is really where software based systems can shine over traditional paper based forms. If we take the Cognology system as an example, our HR Reporting Robots make it easy to collate and present a vast amount of data, but without training Human Resource teams will lack the knowledge they need to understand what their performance data is saying.

Getting help

Cognology’s HR Relationship Managers specialise in reviewing and implementing performance review processes, offering best practice solutions to ensure your organisation fosters a culture of performance excellence, while ensuring ease of use and an employee-first mindset are never forgotten.

As your Performance Management process comes to both an end and a beginning this Financial Year, I urge you to ask yourself two questions:

Do employees find our process: clean, simple, and easy to use?
Does my HR team know how to make decisions from the data we get?